If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully self-conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, Lecture I
Some Thoughts
- For an inquiry to be psychological in nature it is feelings and impulses which must hold court.
- Religious institutions can be looked at through lenses of sociology or theology but that is not psychological inquiry. I can see social psychology touching institutions as a subset of groups.
- We do no need to experience or participate in religious activity in order to evaluate the subject matter. James goes as far as to confine the pool of data to those “developed” records.
- Exemplars are fully self-conscious
- Exemplars are able to articulate. Articulation for me relates to inspiration, the ability to convey self possessed revelation.
- Exemplars acted on their subjective perceptions in such a manner that a record of the thought or action remains. These are the data.
- We need to accept the perceptions of others as authoritative, for them, and as such data for psychological inquiry
- Comforting – should one be in a depressed mode, thinking life without value, then external and internal value can be gained by the candid sharing of those feelings and impulses. All feelings and perceptions are valuable as data. So even from a scientific point of view they contain value, no other person can put the same information though all who share the disposition will immediately identify with the feeling.